Man with a golden shine... Stuart Goldsmith.
Photograph: James Quintin

“I basically find a comedian, find out how they write their jokes, find out if they’re depressed – if they’re not, tell them they probably are – and then work out what it is they’re after [in life].” That’s how standup Stuart Goldsmith describes The Comedian’s Comedian, the podcast he created in 2012 – and he’s only half-joking. The show sees Goldsmith quiz some of the most successful comedians in the industry. But while he warms up with chat about career trajectory and comic voice, conversation soon turns to the very intimate details of his guests’ state of mind.

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For Shappi Khorsandi, that means talking about a recent breakdown. For Jimmy Carr it’s revealing how neuro-linguistic programming changed his life. And for Russell Howard, it’s answering “no” to Goldsmith’s favourite question: are you happy? The result is a podcast that offers a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of comedians’ minds. Goldsmith describes Howard’s admission as “very difficult for someone whose stock-in-trade is optimism and sunshine”; with this dichotomy of seemingly self-possessed comedians talking about the darkness in their lives, Goldsmith has stumbled across a formula that has made his show an endlessly riveting listen for both those in the industry and the rest of us watching from the outside.

Goldsmith originally created The Comedian’s Comedian in response to the mystery surrounding the standup profession. “I realised I’d been a comic for five or six years, and I’d had no official training in it,” he says. “I went to circus school, I trained myself in busking, I did a theatre degree, I felt like the eternal student who’d ended up doing something he’d never studied for.”

During a stint on a short-lived ITV stand-up talent show called Show Me The Funny, he realised nobody seemed to be asking how comedy was created. “They were asking questions that would try to manufacture rivalry between the contestants”, remembers Goldsmith. “I just thought, what a missed opportunity, you’ve got 10 wildly different comics here, why don’t you ask us how we’re doing the thing that you appear to be interested in.”

At the same time Goldsmith was keen to improve his own performance, so approached the comic Simon Evans in the hope of paying for a masterclass. Evans instead suggested the pair discuss joke-writing over a coffee. As soon as Goldsmith left he realised that he had forgotten almost everything Evans had said, “so then I thought, I’ll bloody record this”. More than 175 episodes later, he’s still recording.

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Despite his eureka moment, Goldsmith didn’t invent the comedians-in-conversation podcast: US comic Marc Maron’s WTF is the most famous example, while Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast is perhaps the best-known UK incarnation. But The Comedian’s Comedian is notably more revealing than its main rival. “Richard Herring’s podcasts are brilliant but he’s not interested in really finding anything out. What he likes to do is create humour out of awkward and surreal situations,” says Goldsmith. Or to put it another way, one of Herring’s default questions is “Have you ever tried to suck your own cock?”, whereas Goldsmith says his is about, “How do you cope, pause, how do you really cope?” He views the podcast as a kind of therapy session that can actually help his guests.

That said, analysis of standup, from joke-writing to the construction of a set, is still a big part of the podcast – and often it feels as radical as the soul-baring. It has long been frowned upon to pick apart jokes: somewhere along the line, EB White’s maxim that “analysing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it” has become gospel.

Yet Goldsmith and his guests regularly disprove that rule. Indeed, it’s heartening to hear people talk about comedy not as an ethereal moment of magic, but as a tangible thing that we can learn about. Goldsmith compares hearing something like Dara O Briain’s breakdown of his audience banter or Josh Widdicombe on how he punches up his weaker observational material to finding out the method behind a show-stopping Derren Brown move: “it didn’t ruin the trick, it made it better, because I understood the sheer elegance of the technique he was using. I think comedy is like that.”

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Yet while Goldsmith is not stealthily killing comedy, it’s not an insult to say that the Comedian’s Comedian it isn’t exactly hilarious. “I say to them there is no pressure to perform or be funny and it’s just an intimate conversation about comedy and creativity.” says Goldsmith – but not all comics are prepared to play along. Canadian one-liner comic Stewart Francis, for example, “was completely unable to stop doing shtick in front of the audience. Very, very funny, but five minutes in you can hear my heart break, and 10 minutes in hear me give up”.

Despite the hefty amount of insight unearthed over The Comedian’s Comedian 200-odd hours, it feels as if Goldsmith is just getting started with his study of the medium. Where next for his podcast? “I sort of feel like it’s my life’s mission to do the perfect Simon Munnery interview,” says Goldsmith of the pioneering alternative comic. “I keep putting it off because I don’t know if I’m good enough yet.” Having contributed to the elevation of standup to something you can pore over without looking like a nerdy killjoy, Goldsmith is left with the anxiety that his comedy heroes might not be quite so involved. “My fear is that he’d go: ‘Oh, it’s just a joke,’” he says. “No it isn’t. It’s far more than that.” Comedy: it’s no laughing matter.